Terry Teachout
Terry Teachout
Terry Teachoutis an American critic, biographer, librettist, author, playwright, and blogger. He is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal, the critic-at-large of Commentary, and the author of "Sightings," a column about the arts in America that appears biweekly in the Friday Wall Street Journal. He blogs at About Last Night and has written about the arts for many other magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times and National Review...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCritic
Date of Birth6 February 1956
CountryUnited States of America
A play is not a play until it's performed, and unless it's a one-person play that is acted, directed and designed by the author, many other people will be deeply involved in the complicated process that leads to its performance.
Nowadays, most educated people would just as soon stay home and watch 'Breaking Bad' as shell out a hundred bucks to see a Broadway play - assuming that there are any plays on Broadway worth seeing, which long ago ceased to be a safe bet.
Aesthetes have it all over intellectuals in one very important respect: You'll rarely catch us hustling anyone off to the nearest guillotine. We're too busy trying to make the world more beautiful. Our hands are stained with ink and paint, not blood.
The 'Podunk Times' is not going to have a good dance critic, I absolutely promise you that. There's just not enough dance there.
Just as most of us prefer to watch a trapeze artist work without a net, we like to be absolutely sure that a virtuoso is giving us our money's worth, and a seemingly effortless performance, no matter how spectacular it may be, deprives us of that slightly sadistic thrill.
I suspect that most playgoers don't understand how inexact a science literary translation is. Even the simplest of lines may lend itself to multiple renderings.
Life usually tells the best stories - but sometimes it takes an artist to show us what they mean.
Plays are not written but rewritten, and much of the rewriting takes place at the behest of the director, whose job it is to grapple with the myriad complexities of moving a play from the page to the stage.
What do you see when you look at a representational painting? Most of the time, the first thing I see is a flat piece of canvas covered with colored patterns.
The setting of 'Billy Elliot' is the British miners' strike of 1984-85, about which the average American playgoer knows absolutely nothing.
Not only are most of our citizens fathomlessly ignorant of the glories of American literature, a fast-growing percentage of our students are no longer taught much about any works of American art, be they novels, paintings, symphonies or ballets.
If you're looking for light entertainment, you can't get much lighter than 'Bye Bye Birdie,' a flyweight farce about the coming of rock n' roll to small-town America.
In the early days of jazz, it was ensemble music: everybody playing all together. Nobody really stood out.
Instrumental music is nonverbal and thus radically ambiguous. It doesn't lend itself to what might be called content-oriented analysis, though plenty of intellectuals have tried to analyze it in precisely that way.